Monday, 6 July 2009

Dark on Dark

Although the main thrust of my photography is in colour, I do keep returning to a combination of monochrome tonality and the glimmering, chaotic abundance that seems to happen at various kinds of boundary. Black and white can make a virtue of the kind of highlights that rarely seem to work in colour, unless you go in for that "high dynamic range" look i.e. combining three or more different exposures into one image using software. HDR is something which very few people can pull off with dignity, and which presumably requires the use of a tripod (thanks, but no thanks).

The screen doesn't do justice to the shadow areas in these images -- on paper, they have a much greater richness of tone and detail, that might almost put a knowledgeable viewer in mind of the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper, ahem, though I do say so myself. I can't quite (yet) bring myself to fake the selenium split-toning that these images demand... Would anyone care how the shadows ended up that rich purplish black?